Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 10:33 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
In a real concrete sense, the redemption has already happened and our current task is to become more conscious of how it has happened. That is how we participate in the redemption.
I am sure this is connected to a proper understanding of time, and this must be why I can’t grasp the real (living) meaning of the already happened redemption. Abstractly, I see it means the focus should go on conscious integration/conscious steering, which somehow, would more and more translate in a reality on all planes, including the physical. Then, whether or not the redemption is
really accomplished, the broken cup is
really reconstituted, and so on, will dissolve as questions, as we move our home in the control room of the creative unfolding of our states. But we have to initiate that understanding by a willed imaginative act, so that we can see more and more states, larger and larger states as affectable/affected by our intentional activity. As soon as they appear as affectable in our consciousness, they become affected. I see all that. But only as an intellectual reasoning. When I try to quit the reasoning, and to descend in the realization, i.e. when I try to
make it, with my thinking gestures, I get either stuck in a Sci-Fi-like scenario, or scared by a sort of feeling of implosion, that powerfully thrusts me back to where I was coming from. So I’m back to
seizing the realization at its word-handles with the pliers of my intellect. In the end, only the words remain caught in the grip, and the realization itself vanishes. I see that the verbal structure of our languages does not help. It’s a decohering school. It’s by far the most consistent education we have ever received in our life, it should stay at the top of our education section in our resumes: “date-of-birth - to date / ubiquitous - World Decohering School”
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
Our spiritual activity is already four convolutions deep in the bureaucracy of our conceptual thinking, so we don't need to make it even more of a bureaucratic endurance by teasing apart sentences and wordings. Instead we should seek the leeway of our inverted spiritual activity which rises from the fragmented perceptions to fleshed out holistic intuition.
Yes, I’m eager to find these coordinates and direction.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
Playing by the rules of standard language won't get us very far at all if we intend to pursue this red thread of redemption upwards. This is why I say the topic is nowhere to be found in Max's essay. In my view, and perhaps contrary to your expectations, it's not one that can be discursively analyzed by the intellect. It certainly won't be treated adequately in any short paragraph or essay.
Yes, I have some awareness of the inadequacies of standard language.
Coming to Cleric’s post and the broken cup example, as I said, I find it somewhat scary, in a strange way. In a sense it has the taste of tautology. Not saying of course it’s a tautological illustration, but only that such taste signals to me I can’t properly grasp it. Tautology and implosion. I can’t explain that rationally, it’s a feeling. Or maybe it's not a feeling, it's an unconsequential thought. I'm not sure. Rationally I do follow the argument, as I’ve described above. Yet there is, in that post, a specific element that has somewhat advanced my holistic understanding, as far as I can tell. Similar to the plunge feeling you recently described. These were the crucial words for me, both helping and scary (not a contradiction):
Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Jan 26, 2023 10:24 pm
It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.
***
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
If we can't imagine ways in which the 'humpty dumpty' of holistic spiritual phenomena can be put back together again after cracking into the zillion fragments of physical, life, soul, and cultural phenomena, then it simply means we need to work on our imagination (myself included, of couse). As Cleric said before, everything should stand before us as a mighty riddle. The redemption has already happened through the Christ-being's descent into the physical plane, yet it is also going to happen through our lawful ascent as we become true humans - the imagination begins to resolve these seeming paradoxes for the intellect. Redemption (elevation of our humanity) is not either descent or ascent, it is both/and (I know this may sound like a Lou-ism, but all the spiritual evolutionary value comes in discerning exactly how it is both/and).
I am following this summary.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
I'm not sure what you mean it has made the technology pedagogical on the spot.
I mean that the pedagogical value can be experienced immediately. Provided that one is open to looking at oneself in that mirror, the experience is instantly possible, because the mirror was brought right inside the thread. In the case of VR, that wouldn’t be possible. What I experienced is a less than edifying reflected image, not only of the appearance of my language-shaped thinking as conditioned by my passionate soul-life, but also of my soul-life itself.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
our own thinking is often imitatively reconfiguring elements already known to it, trying to figure out which words should follow which other words with its shallow probabilistic assessment.
Instead we can attune ourselves to these top-down forces which have already solved the problems of tribalized human culture, have already redeemed the fragmented materializing technology of the world.
Yes, I intuited that, but your more detailed illustration is helpful.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:21 am
Extracting the spiritual pedagogical value of phenomena is one and the same with their redemption. That's because their redemption is one and the same with the process of learning more about ourselves through them. It is saving by transforming ourselves so that we may be transformed by the guiding forces - "change your inner being [metanoia], for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near". The transformation is no ordinary thing - it's the same sort of transformation we go through to some extent during sleep, to a more expansive extent after our physical death, and that the Earth goes through at the end of her ages. It is more properly called a 'transfiguration'. The moral experiences we attain through living knowledge of the phenomenal world, and therefore ourselves, are transmuted into spiritual forces which will progressively feed back through to transformations of the phenomenal world into more and more spiritualized states. We shouldn't expect the potential expression of harmful intents to go away - that would be a regression to an instinctive 'morality', rather than a fully conscious one. It is precisely because we have difficulty imagining these dynamics with ordinary thinking that we should be impelled to transform ourselves further - if we had no difficulty imagining, then we would always be satisfied with where we currently are.
Thank you.
Federica,
I thought of another angle to approach from. Besides sleep and death, there is another phenomenon which is more accessible to our modern scientific understanding - the inner world of our physical body (which actually consists of the etheric-astral-ego depth structure as well). The outer world stands in a similar relation to this inner world as how our waking life stands in relation to sleep-death. It is a 'liminal space' in which our ordinary cognition has no knowledge or only dreamy knowledge of what is taking place. First we can notice that the inner world unfolds more directly to even our ordinary cognition as temporal processes, unlike the outer spatial world with its mostly fixed objects where we barely notice any evolution.
Secular science falls prey to the
aliasing effect - it simply assumes that what goes into the body from external nature, and what goes out of the body in the form of excretions, retains that fundamental character as it undergoes all the liminal processes within the body. What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil. Any one of these spaces - inner bodily world, sleep, death - if investigated carefully with living thinking, reveals very similar processes. It reveals the intentional activity of spiritual forces, in which we ourselves participate, which transmutes sense-perceptions, experiences, external substances, etc. into WFT forces which restore the vitality, health, life, spiritual content, of the former. Secular science speaks of this vaguely and abstractly with respect to
sleeping-dreaming. Yet the archetypal spiritual reality of these liminal processes reveal much more profound truths.
Steiner wrote:In any case, we see an immediate transformation when external, physical substances are taken in — let us say, by the mouth. We need only put a small grain of salt in the mouth and it is at once dissolved. The transformation is immediate. The physical body of man is not the same, in its inner nature, as the external world; it transforms what it takes in, and then transforms it back again. Thus we must seek for something within the human organism that is, at first, similar to external nature and, on excretion, becomes so again. It is what lies between these two stages that we must first discover.
Try to picture this that I have said: On the one hand, we have what the organism takes in; on the other, what it gives of including even the physical body as a whole. Between these are the processes within the organism itself. From the study of what the human physical organism takes in we can say nothing at all about the relation of man to external nature. We might put it this way: Though external physical nature does destroy man's corpse, dissolving and dissipating it, man does, with his organism, ‘get even’ with Nature. He dissolves everything he receives from her. Thus, when we commence with man's organs of assimilation, we find no relationship to external nature, for this is destroyed by them. We only find such a relationship when we turn to what man excretes. In relation to the form man bears into physical life, Nature is a destroyer; in regard to what man casts off, Nature receives what the human organism provides. Thus the human physical organism comes eventually to be very unlike itself and to resemble external Nature very much. It does this through excretion.
If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They are, today, just what they have become; but they have certainly not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys — or transforms — what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say ‘transforms’.) At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the substances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which some-thing within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.
Actually this restoration occurs every duration of our waking experience as well, and the qualia of that experience - colors, smells, tastes, sounds, textures - are forces at the threshold of the spiritual world continually impinging on our physical consciousness but dying out rapidly when we remain with ordinary waking cognition (unlike in our dreams where we open up to and flow along with them in an instinctive manner). It is the same principle as the thought-distractions - we are constantly dying in our inattentive selfish thoughts, returning to the spiritual world, and then reincarnating in 'fresh' thought by its good grace. In this sense, the redemptive principle is always at work within the liminal spaces of experience.
Within color (as within the form of those entities that we behold) lies the hope that matter will again become light—the light that it is in the depths; moreover, there lies the hope that matter will reawaken as the light of ideas, as the warmth of life within the human soul. This is the Earth's secret. It is the secret of the light's rebirth insofar as it rises up as the fabric of thought, within thought, by ceasing to die out into the specter of space, or into the specter of time. We can reascend from the specter to the light.
Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 49). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.
One clear aspect of what takes place in these liminal spaces is what Cleric has described as the '
last in, first out' principle of computer processing (that only being a dim mechanized cultural shadow of actual living processes). Throughout all of spiritual scientific research, we find descriptions of how we run through our experiences in reverse during sleep and after death. For ex., the reverse 'life-review' that we experience as an imagistic panaroma in the etheric body after casting off the physical body. A similar review happens every time we sleep. Instead of experiencing only the outer physiognomy of those experiences in dim perceptions-concepts clothed in abstract space and linear time, we experience from the perspective of the inner spiritual forces which holistically impressed them. So these are really the
same experiences viewed from opposite poles of consciousness, although that rhythmic alternating process introduces new shades of meaning to the experiences. Consider the following.
Steiner wrote:Still another question arises here, moreover a very important one. — What happens when we have a very short sleep — for example an afternoon nap? Or indeed when we have a brief forty winks during a lecture, but really do go to sleep; the whole thing may last only two or three minutes, perhaps only a minute or half a minute. What happens then? If the sleep were real, we were in the spiritual world during that half minute.
The truth is, my dear friends, that for this short nap even during a lecture, the same holds good as for the all-night sleep of a lie-a-bed — I mean, of course, a human lie-a-bed! As a matter of fact, whenever a man falls asleep, even for a brief moment, the whole sleep is a unity and the astral body is an unconscious prophet; it surveys the whole sleep up to the point of waking ... in perspective, of course. What is remote may lack clarity, as when a short-sighted person looks down an avenue and does not see the trees at the farther end of it. In the same way the astral body may be short-sighted, figuratively speaking, in the subconscious. Its perception does not reach the point where the individual earth-lives begin. But broadly speaking, the fact is that even during the briefest sleep we rush with tremendous, lightning-like rapidity through all our earthly lives. This is a matter of extraordinary significance. Naturally it is all very hazy; but if somebody falls asleep during a lecture, then the lecturer or those who share his power of observation have it in front of them. Think of it: the whole of earth-evolution, together with what the sleeper has experienced in previous earthly lives! When somebody falls asleep during a lecture everything lacks clarity because it happens with such terrific rapidity; one thing merges quickly into another, but it is there, nevertheless. From this you will understand that karma is perpetually present, inscribed as it were in the World-Chronicle. And every time a man falls asleep he has opportunity to approach his karma. This is one of the great secrets of existence.
Every short nap we take, we have the opportunity of approaching our entire Karma and thereby setting on the process of redeeming it. In other words, every duration of our experienced world-state is only what it is because the holistic forces of our entire spiritual evolution continually inflow our consciousness and thereby constitute it. These fundamental principles of our spiritual existence shouldn't be treated as only partially applicable, which is practically how the secular culture treats them - when it comes to dead things of the perceptible world, the principles are upheld dogmatically, but when it comes to living things, to ideal things, to moral things, the liminal forces from which the principles actually flow forth, they are discarded or modified or selectively paid attention to as we please. The redemptive principle which works through the liminal spaces of experience is not only limited to certain phenomena and not others - to natural phenomena and not cultural phenomena, or to some cultural phenomena and not others. They are universally applicable, which is why we have such an archetypally and lawfully structured spiritual evolution which reflects dimly, at our current stage, into our natural and cultural laws.
It is very true that discerning these principles is only the very beginning of our work and they will remain things we are seizing only with the pliers of the intellect until we also persistently engage our inverted spiritual activity during meditation, so that we make more conscious this ceaseless inflowing of Cosmic impulses from the liminal spaces. The meditative state is a willful trusting of our thinking force to the Wise spiritual guidance of humankind. Nevertheless, that spiritual guidance needs something to work with and these holistic principles we are discerning through our conceptual reasoning provide it with the foundation on which our Imaginative life can be erected, or the purified sheaths in which the Spirit can find a proper vessel for its intuitive becoming. Trust me, I know the feeling of 'man, I am hopelessly stuck surveying these things from only the outer side, as abstract schemas', but I also know the consistent defying of such habitually expected limitations when remaining prayerfully persistent and trusting in pursuit of attunement with the Wise guidance. Just in the process of writing this one post, I have had the opportunity to revisit key texts from the archive and the forum and deepen my living understanding. There are always new depths of meaning to redeem from the forms of the world through our devoted spiritual activity.